Meet Our New Name

By JODI RUDOREN

Published: February 5, 2006

WHAT'S in a name? The new one my husband, Gary (formerly Ruderman), and I (formerly Wilgoren) adopted has three letters from his father's father's father and four letters from my patrilineal ancestors -- or perhaps from the imagination of some anonymous clerk at Ellis Island.

It's just a made-up moniker, but it is made up of our commitment to equality, with a nod to family history and a dash of out-of-the-box creativity. Most important, it is a name we share and will share with our potential offspring. To me there is no sound so sweet.

To others it sounds, well, weird.

''Seriously?'' our friend Mark said, staring at Gary in disbelief when we made the big announcement over brunch celebrating our first anniversary. Though we've been flooded with enthusiastic e-mail messages -- more than a few from people who toyed with the idea themselves -- one of Gary's clients told him, ''That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.''

Gary, a 43-year-old architect and playwright, and I, 35, with 926 bylines under my old name in this newspaper, decided to intertwine identities as well as lives mostly out of frustration with other options.

Tradition hardly seemed enough reason for me to take his name, and I didn't want to have a different name from my future children. I imagined them asking why and realized the only possible answer was patriarchy. I didn't want my family founded on that principle. When I suggested that Gary put himself in my place -- in the place of most women -- facing the choice of abandoning his family name or of not having the same name as his kids, he eventually became a convert to combination.

For us hyphenation was unrealistic: the six-syllable behemoth would hardly fit the width of a newspaper column or, as our 8-year-old nephew, Jake, pointed out, on the back of an athletic jersey.

So we started to mix and match letters. Wilder? Gorman? We wanted to retain more of the integrity of where we came from. Rudergoren was a mouthful. I jokingly proposed Wruderman with a silent ''W'' (which Gary loved). A colleague suggested ''R?' in a heavy French accent. Wilgerman, Wilderman, Ruderwilg, Rudergore. Weird, weird, weird.

Rudoren (rue-DOOR-en) felt the most real. We Googled it and found a section of an island in Finland. Someday we'll claim that as ancestral homeland.

Commingling of names is still too rare to be considered a trend, but we are not alone. The mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, was Mr. Villar before he married Connie Raigosa in 1987. A friend introduced us to Jason (n?ell) and Tonya (n?Osborne) Delborne, who have been happily merged for a decade. Last summer The Chicago Tribune profiled four fellow melders, citing a sociologist's survey in which one of 600 married women at a university had a combined name.

Since Rudoren did not appear on our marriage certificate, change meant a court order, a six-week process that costs $389 (plus $143 for 15 certified copies). Among the eight name changers in the Cook County Chancery Division with us on Jan. 13 were two transsexuals, a young man reclaiming his father's surname, a middle-aged man who found an unfamiliar name on his birth certificate when he went to get a passport for a cruise, and Alan Goldenstein, who was adopting his wife's name, Behnke, as a middle name.

The judge, Sophia H. Hall, was baffled. ''Why do you want to do that?'' she demanded, inquiring whether we might be trying to escape creditors. The woman at the driver's license counter, herself soon to be married, pronounced it profoundly cool.

''It appears that married life has literally taken the 'man' out of you,'' a friend teased Gary by e-mail. Recalling the Wilgoren Watch Web log created to criticize my coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign, a colleague said I was entering a journalist protection program.

What's in a name? It sounds hokey, but combination means celebrating our couplehood whenever I spell my name in a phone message or see my byline or make a dinner reservation. By the time we have to explain it to the kids, it may sound normal.